Professional Graphics Accelerators of Today: ATI vs. Nvidia. Page 5

Today we are going to talk about those graphics cards that are intended not for gaming needs, but for serious work. We managed to get our hands on a few new solutions from Nvidia and ATI from the Quadro and FireGL series. Let’s find out what innovation shave they prepared for professionals working in 3D modeling applications and CAD software.

ATI FireGL V3400

FireGL V3400 professional graphics accelerator belongs to the entry level solution but costs around $300. From the gaming market prospective, it is a fully-fledged graphics card based on a 128-bit ATI RV530 GPU manufactured with 90nm process, just like the FireGL V5200. In other words, FireGL V3400 can boast 5 vertex shaders and 12 pixel pipelines that are fully compatible with Shader Model 3.0.

The major differences between FireGL V3400 and FireGL V5200 are the lower working frequencies and less onboard memory. Just like FireGL V5200, our hero features 4 texturing units, however its GPU works at 500MHz frequency.

As for the memory, FireGL V3400 features only 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM working at 980MHz and supporting 128-bit bus.

In other words, FireGL V3400 graphics card has pretty similar hardware specs as the gaming Radeon X1600 PRO, while the more expensive FireGL V5200 is closer to Radeon X1600 XT.

Despite the relatively low price for a professional graphics solution, this card is also supplied with a special professional OpenGL driver that is optimized for major 3D modeling applications and cannot run on gaming cards.

As for the other features of FireGL V3400, it has 2 DVI Outs, one of which supports Dual-Link technology. So, you can not only use two displays (there can be analog displays as well as digital displays connected to it), but one of them can support resolutions up to 3840x2400.

I would like to say that FireGL V3400 looks very similar to FireGL V5200. Both these cards use the same PCB layout and the same cooling system. Moreover, you can only tell the difference between them by reading the memory chip marking, because they uses memory chips of different capacity.